The UK's largest grocery store chain has a revolutionary new strategy: giving away free food

With 3,700 stores in the U.K. and 750 more in other countries, Tesco is easily Britain’s largest grocery store chain. They’re incredibly successful but have been facing a growing food waste problem as many items grow too old to sell. Their new solution? Give it away to customers for free.

Tesco has been trying to reduce the amount of food waste it produces year after year, hoping to reduce the amount of thrown-away food by 50%. However, with rising food prices due to global inflation and rising cost of living expenses, the prices of several food staples such as meat, eggs, and milk have gone up. The BBC reports that over seven million people in the UK are “food insecure.” So as a means to clear their inventory and reduce food waste, Tesco is trying a new policy of giving away expiring food at the end of each day.

"This trial will allow customers to take any remaining yellow-stickered items for free at the end of the day, after they have first been offered to charities and colleagues," said a Tesco spokesperson. All supermarkets in the U.K. send surplus food to charities, but Tesco is the first direct-to-customer policy being implemented in the nation so far.

Food waste has been and continues to be a global problem. In 2022 alone, the world generated about 1.02 billion tonnes of wasted food. Globally, we throw away one trillion U.S. dollars worth of food each year in spite of up to 783 million people going hungry. This food waste in our landfills also generates up to 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, too.

A number of countries have created newer policies in order to combat this problem. Similar to Tesco, France enacted a law in 2016 making it illegal for supermarkets to throw away food, making grocers donate any unsold products. Norway has pledged to reduce its food waste by half by 2030, initiating policies to encourage grocers to donate or deep discount expiring food, even establishing a whole grocery chain dedicated to expiring food. In Japan, grocery stores are offering bonus points to apply to future purchases to customers that buy expiring food along with enacting a Food Recycling Law that diverts food wastes to centers that will convert it into compost, animal feed, and energy instead of letting it rot in landfills.

The United States has also pledged to reduce its food waste by half by 2030, however there hasn’t been any sweeping federal legislation, just federal agencies such as the FDA and EPA conferring with major players in the food industry to come up with solutions as various states enact their own policies. The majority of these state policies include tax break incentives for those who donate food along with legal liability protection for those who donate. This does little to combat the 40% of food that gets thrown away or rots in the field each year, along with feeding the 47 million Americans who are food insecure each year.

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It will be interesting to see if Tesco’s policy works out in everyone’s favor. Hopefully if it does it will become adopted as the standard by the government and the private sector in order to ensure that people are fed, food isn’t wasted, and a meaningful dent in climate change is achieved.